First Scientific Lecture-Course

Schmidt Number: S-3950

On-line since: 21st April, 2000

SEVENTH LECTURE

Stuttgart, 30th December 1919.

My dear
Friends,

We will begin
today with an experiment bearing upon our studies of the theory of
colour. As I have said before, all I can give you in this Course
can only be improvised and aphoristic. Hence too I cannot keep to
the conventional categories of the Physics textbooks, — in
saying which I do not mean to imply that it would be better if I
did. In the last resort I wish to lead you to a certain kind of
insight into Science, and you must look on all that I bring forward
in the meantime as a kind of preparation. We are not advancing in
the usual straight line. We try to gather up the diverse phenomena
we need, forming a circle as it were, — then to move forward
from the circumference towards the centre.

You have seen
that wherever colours arise there is a working-together of light
and darkness. What we now have to do is to observe as many
phenomena as we can before we try to theorize. We want to form a
true conception of what underlies this interplay of light and
darkness. Today I will begin by shewing you the phenomenon of
coloured shadows, as they are called.

Here are two
candles (Figure
VIIa), — candles as sources of light — and an
upright rod which will throw shadows on this screen. You see two
shadows, without perceptible colour. You only need to take a good
look at what is here before you, you will be bound to say: the
shadow you are seeing on the right is the one thrown by the
left-hand source of light. It is produced, in that the light from
this source is hidden by the rod. Likewise the shadow on the left
arises where the light from the right-hand source is covered.
Relatively dark spaces are created, — that is all. Where the
shadow is, is simply a dark space. Moreover, looking at the surface
of the screen apart from the two bands of shadow, you will agree it
is illumined by both sources of light. Now I will colour the one
(the left-hand) light. I make the light go through a plate of
coloured glass, so that this one of the lights is now coloured
— that is, darkened to some extent. As a result, you will see
that the shadow of the rod, due to this left-hand source of light
— the one which I am darkening to red — this shadow on
the right becomes green. It becomes green just as a purely white
background does when you look sharply for example at a small red
surface for a time, then turn your eye away and look straight at
the white. You then see green where you formerly saw red, though
there is nothing there. You yourself, as it were, see the green
colour on to the white surface. In such a case, you are seeing the
green surface as an after-image in time of the red which you were
seeing just before, when you exposed your eye to the red surface
that was actually there. And so in this case: when I darken the
source of light to red, you see the shadow green. What was mere
darkness before, you now see green. And now I darken the same
source of light to green, — the shadow becomes red. And when
I darken it to blue, an orange shadow is produced. If I should
darken it to violet, it would give yellow.

Figure VIIa

And now
consider please the following phenomenon; it is most important,
therefore I mention it once more. Say in a room you have a red
cushion with a white crochet cover, through the rhombic-patterned
apertures of which the red of the cushion shines through. You look
at the red rhombic pattern and then look away to the white. On the
white ground you see the same lattice-work in green. Of course it
isn't there, but your own eye is active and makes an after-effect,
which, as you focus on the white, generates the green,
“subjective” images, as one is wont to call them.

Goethe was
familiar with this phenomenon, and also knew that of the coloured
shadows. I darken this source of light and get green, said Goethe
to himself, and he went on to describe it somewhat as follows: When
I darken this source of light, the white screen as a whole shines
red. I am not really seeing the white screen; what I see is a
reddish-shining colour. In fact I see the screen more or less red.
And as an outcome — as with the cushion mentioned just now
— I with my own eye generate the contrasting colour. There is
no real green here. I only see the green incidentally, because the
screen as a whole now has a reddish colour.

However, this
idea of Goethe's is mistaken, as you may readily convince
yourselves. Take a little tube and look through it, so that you
only see the shadow; you will still see it green. You no longer see
what is around it, you only see the green which is objectively
there at the place you look at. You can convince yourself by this
experiment that the green really is objective. It remains green,
hence the phenomenon cannot be one of mere contrast but is
objective. We cannot now provide for everyone to see it, but as the
proverb says, “durch zweier Zeugen Mund wird alle Wahrheit
kund” — two witnesses will always tell the truth. I
will produce the phenomenon and you must now look through on to the
green strip. It stays green, does it not? So with the other colour:
if I engendered red by means of green, it would stay red. Goethe in
this instance was mistaken, and as the error is incorporated in his
Theory of Colour it must of course be rectified.
[After some careful experiments on a later occasion,
Dr. Steiner admitted that there is an error here. (See the
Translator's Note
on this passage.) He also recommended chemical and photographic
researches to show the real nature of coloured shadows.]

Now to begin
with, my dear Friends, along with all the other phenomena which we
have studied, I want you to take note of the pure fact we have just
demonstrated. In the one case we get a grey, a bit of darkness, a
mere shadow. In the other case we permeate the shadow, so to speak,
with colour. The light and darkness then work together in a
different way. We note that by darkening the light with red the
objective phenomenon of the green is called forth. Now side by side
with this, I also drew your attention to what appears, as is
generally said, “subjectively”. We have then, in the
one case, what would be called an “objective”
phenomenon, the green that stays there on the screen; though not a
permanently fixed colour, it stays as long as we create the
requisite conditions. Whilst in the other case we have something,
as it were, subjectively conditioned by our eye alone. Goethe calls
the green colour that appears to me when I have been exposing my
eye for a time to red, the colour or coloured after-image that is
evoked or “required” (gefordert), — called forth
by reaction.

Now there is
one thing we must insist on in this connection. The
“subjective, objective” distinction, between the colour
that is temporarily fixed here and the colour that seems only to be
called forth as an after-image by the eye, has no foundation in any
real fact. When I am seeing red through my eyes, as at this moment,
you know there is all the physical apparatus we were describing a
few days ago; the vitreous body, the lens, the aqueous humour
between the lens and the cornea, — a highly differentiated
physical apparatus. This physical apparatus, mingling light and
darkness as it does in the most varied ways with one another, is in
no other relation to the objectively existent ether than all the
apparatus we have here set up — the screen, the rod and so
on. The only difference is that in the ^one case the whole
apparatus is my eye; I see an objective phenomenon through my own
eye. It is the same objective phenomenon which I see here, only
that this one stays. By dint of looking at the red, my eye will
subsequently react with the “required” colour —
to use Goethe's term, — the eye, according to its own
conditions, being gradually restored to its neutral state. But the
real process by means of which I see the green when I see it thus,
as we are wont to say, “subjectively” — through
the eye alone, — is in no way different from what it is when
I fix the colour “objectively” as in this
experiment.

Therefore I
said in an earlier lecture: You, your subjective being, do not live
in such a way that the ether is there vibrating outside of you and
the effect of it then finds expression in your experience of
colour. No, you yourself are swimming in the ether — you are
one with it. It is but an incidental difference, whether you become
at one with the ether through this apparatus out here or through a
process that goes on in your own eye. There is no real nor
essential difference between the green image engendered spatially
by the red darkening of the light, and the green afterimage,
appearing afterwards only in point of time. Looked at objectively
there is no tangible difference, save that the process is spatial
in the one case and temporal in the other. That is the one
essential difference. A sensible and thoughtful contemplation of
these things will lead you no longer to look for the contrast,
“subjective and objective” as we generally call it, in
the false direction in which modern Science generally tries to see
it. You will then see it for what it really is. In the one case we
have rigged-up an apparatus to engender colour while our eye stays
neutral — neutral as to the way the colours are here produced
— and is thus able to enter into and unite with what is here.
In the other case the eye itself is the physical apparatus. What
difference does it make, whether the necessary apparatus is out
there, or in your frontal cavity? We are not outside the things,
then first projecting the phenomena we see out into space. We with
our being are in the things; moreover we are in them even more
fully when we go on from certain kinds of physical phenomena to
others. No open-minded person, examining the phenomena of colour in
all their aspects, can in the long run fail to admit that we are in
them — not, it is true, with our ordinary body, but certainly
with our etheric body and thereby also with the astral part of our
being.

And now let us
descend from Light to Warmth. Warmth too we perceive as a condition
of our environment which gains significance for us whenever we are
exposed to it. We shall soon see, however, that as between the
perception of light and the perception of warmth there is a very
significant difference. You can localize the perception of light
clearly and accurately in the physical apparatus of the eye, the
objective significance of which I have been stressing. But if you
ask yourself in all seriousness, “How shall I now compare the
relation I am in to light with the relation I am in to
warmth?”, you will have to answer, “While my relation
to the light is in a way localized — localized by my eye at a
particular place in my body, — this is not so for warmth. For
warmth the whole of me is, so to speak, the sense-organ. For
warmth, the whole of me is what my eye is for the light”. We
cannot therefore speak of the perception of warmth in the same
localized sense as of the perception of light. Moreover, precisely
in realizing this we may also become aware of something more.

What are we
really perceiving when we come into relation to the
warmth-condition of our surroundings? We must admit, we have a very
distinct perception of the fact that we are swimming in the
warmth-element of our environment. And yet, what is it of us that
is swimming? Please answer for yourselves the question: What is it
that is swimming when you are swimming in the warmth of your
environment? Take then the following experiment. Fill a bucket with
water just warm enough for you to feel it lukewarm. Put both your
hands in — not for long, only to test it. Then put your left
hand in water as hot as you can bear and your right hand in water
as cold as you can bear. Then put both hands quickly back again
into the lukewarm water. You will find the lukewarm water seeming
very warm to your right hand and very cold to your left. Your left
hand, having become hot, perceives as cold what your right hand,
having become cold, perceives as warmth. Before, you felt the same
lukewarmness on either side. What is it then? It is your own warmth
that is swimming there. Your own warmth makes you feel the
difference between itself and your environment. What is it
therefore, once again, — what is it of you that is swimming
in the warmth-element of your environment? It is your own
state-of-warmth, brought about by your own organic process. Far
from this being an unconscious thing, your consciousness indwells
it. Inside your skin you are living in this warmth, and according to
the state of this your own warmth you converse — communicate
and come to terms — with the element of warmth in your
environment, wherein your own bodily warmth is swimming. It is your
warmth-organism which really swims in the warmth of your
environment. — If you think these things through, you will
come nearer the real processes of Nature — far nearer than by
what is given you in modern Physics, abstracted as it is from all
reality.

Now let us go
still farther down. We experience our own state-of-warmth by
swimming with it in our environment-of-warmth. When we are warmer
than our environment we feel the latter as if it were drawing,
sucking at us; when we are colder we feel as though it were
imparting something to us. But this grows different again when we
consider how we are living in yet another element. Once more then:
we have the faculty of living in what really underlies the light;
we swim in the element of light. Then, in the way we have been
explaining, we swim in the element of warmth. But we are also able
to swim in the element of air, which of course we always have
within us. We human beings, after all, are to a very small extent
solid bodies. More than 90% of us is just a column of water, and
— what matters most in this connection — the water in
us is a kind of intermediary between the airy and the solid state.
Now we can also experience ourselves quite consciously in the airy
element, just as we can in the element of warmth. Our consciousness
descends effectively into the airy element. Even as it enters into
the element of light and into the element of warmth, so too it
enters into the element of air. Here again, it can
“converse”, it can communicate and come to terms with
what is taking place in our environment of air. It is precisely
this “conversation” which finds expression in the
phenomena of sound or tone. You see from this: we
must distinguish between different levels in our consciousness. One
level of our consciousness is the one we live with in the element
of light, inasmuch as we ourselves partake in this element. Quite
another level of our consciousness is the one we live with in the
element of warmth, inasmuch as we ourselves, once more, are
partaking in it. And yet another level of our consciousness is the
one we live with in the element of air, inasmuch as we ourselves
partake also in this. Our consciousness is indeed able to dive down
into the gaseous or airy element. Then are we living in the airy
element of our environment and are thus able to perceive the
phenomena of sound and of musical tone. Even as we ourselves with
our own consciousness have to partake in the phenomena of light so
that we swim in the light-phenomena of our environment; and as we
have to partake in the element of warmth so that we swim also in
this; so too must we partake in the element of air. We must
ourselves have something of the airy element within us in a
differentiated form so that we may be able to perceive —
when, say, a pipe, a drum or a violin is resounding — the
differentiated airy element outside us. In this respect, my dear
Friends, our bodily nature is indeed of the greatest interest even
to outward appearance. There is our breathing process: we
breathe-in the air and breathe it out again. When we breathe-out
the air we push our diaphragm upward. This involves a relief of
tension, a relaxation, for the whole of our organic system beneath
the diaphragm. In that we raise the diaphragm as we breathe-out and
thus relieve the organic system beneath the diaphragm, the
cerebrospinal fluid in which the brain is swimming is driven
downward. Here now the cerebrospinal fluid is none other than a
somewhat condensed modification, so to speak, of the air, for it is
really the out-breathed air which brings about the process. When I
breathe-in again, the cerebrospinal fluid is driven upward. I,
through my breathing, am forever living in this rhythmic,
downward-and-upward, upward-and-downward undulation of the
cerebrospinal fluid, which is quite clearly an image of my whole
breathing process. In that my bodily organism partakes in these
oscillations of the breathing process, there is an inner
differentiation, enabling me to perceive and experience the airy
element in consciousness. Indeed by virtue of this process, of
which admittedly I have been giving only a rather crude
description, I am forever living in a rhythm-of-life which both in
origin and in its further course consists in an inner
differentiation of the air.

In that you
breathe and bring about — not of course so crudely but in a
manifold and differentiated way — this upward and downward
oscillation of the rhythmic forces, there is produced within you
what may itself be described as an organism of vibrations, highly
complicated, forever coming into being and passing away again. It
is this inner organism of vibrations which in our ear we bring to
bear upon what sounds towards us from without when, for example,
the string of a musical instrument gives out a note. We make the
one impinge upon the other. And just as when you plunge your hand
into the lukewarm water you perceive the state-of-warmth of your
own hand by the difference between the warmth of your hand and the
warmth of the water, so too do you perceive the tone or sound by
the impact and interaction of your own inner, wondrously
constructed musical instrument with the sound or tone that comes to
manifestation in the air outside you. The ear is in a way the
bridge, by which your own inner “lyre of Apollo” finds
its relation, in ever-balancing and compensating interplay, with
the differentiated airy movement that comes to you from without.
Such, in reality is hearing. The real process of hearing —
hearing of the differentiated sound or tone — is, as you see,
very far removed from the abstraction commonly presented.
Something, they say, is going on in the space outside, this then
affects my ear, and the effect upon my ear is perceived in some way
as an effect on my subjective being. For the “subjective
being” is at long last referred to — described in some
kind of demonology — or rather, not described at all. We
shall not get any further if we do not try to think out clearly,
what is the underlying notion in this customary presentation. You
simply cannot think these notions through to their conclusion, for
what this school of Physics never does is to go simply into the
given facts.

Thus in effect
we have three stages in man's relation to the outer world — I
will describe them as the stage of Light, the stage of Warmth, and
that of Tone or Sound. There is however a remarkable fact in this
connection. Look open-mindedly at your relation to the element of
light — your swimming in the element of light — and you
will have to admit: It is only with your etheric body that you can
live in what is there going on in the outer world. Not so when you
are living in the element of warmth. You really live in the
warmth-element of your environment with your whole bodily nature.
Having thus contemplated how you live in light and warmth, look
farther down — think how you live in the element of tone and
sound — and you will recognize: Here you yourself are
functioning as an airy body. You, as a living organism of air, live
in the manifoldly formed and differentiated outer air. It is no
longer the ether; it is external physical matter, namely air. Our
living in the warmth-element is then a very significant
border-line. Our life in the element of warmth is for our
consciousness a kind of midway level — a niveau. You
recognize it very clearly in the simple fact that for pure feeling
and sensation you are scarcely able to distinguish outer warmth
from inner warmth. Your life in the light-element however lies
above this level:—

Light ↑
—————— Warmth ——————
Air (Sound, Tone) ↓

For light, you
ascend as it were into a higher, into an etheric sphere, therein to
live with your consciousness. On the other hand you go beneath this
level, beneath this niveau, when in perceiving tone or sound
you as a man-of-air converse and come to terms with the surrounding
air. While upon this niveau itself (in the perceiving of
warmth) you come to terms with the outer world in a comparatively
simple way.

Now bring
together what I have just been shewing with what I told you before
out of Anatomy and Physiology. Then you will have to conceive the
eye as the physical apparatus, to begin with. Indeed the farther
outward you go, the more physical do you find the eye to be; the
farther in you go, the more is it permeated with vitality. We
therefore have in us a localized organ — the eye — with
which to lift ourselves above a certain level or niveau.
Upon this actual niveau we live as it were on equal terms
with our environment; with our own warmth we meet the warmth of our
environment and perceive the difference, whatever it may be. Here
we have no such specialized organ as the eye; the whole of us, we
ourselves in some way, become the sense-organ. And we dive down
beneath this level or niveau when functioning as airy man,
— when we converse and come to terms with the differentiated
outer air. Here once again the “conversation” becomes
localized — localized namely in this “lyre of
Apollo”, in this rhythmic play of our whole organism, of
which the rhythmic play of our spinal fluid is but the image and
the outcome. Here then again we have something localized —
only beneath the niveau this time, whilst in the eye it is
above this midway level.

The Psychology
of our time is, as you see, in an even sorrier position than the
Physiology and Physics, and we can scarcely blame our physicists if
they speak so unrealistically of what is there in the outer world,
since they get so little help from the psychologists. The latter,
truth to tell, have been only too well disciplined by the Churches,
which have claimed all the knowledge of the soul and Spirit for
their own domain. Very obediently the psychologists restrict their
study to the external apparatus, calling this external apparatus
“Man”. They speak no doubt of soul and mind, or even
Spirit, but in mere words, mere sounding phrases, until Psychology
becomes at last a mere collection of words. For in their books they
never tell us what we are to understand by soul and mind and
Spirit, — how we should conceive them. So then the physicists
come to imagine that the light is there at work quite outside us;
this light affects the human eye. The eye somehow responds; at any
rate it receives an impression. This then becomes subjective inner
experience. Now comes the veriest tangle of confused ideas. The
physicists allege it to be much the same as to the other
sense-organs. They follow what they learn from the psychologists.
In text-books of Psychology you will generally find a chapter on
the Science of the Senses, as though such a thing as
“sense” or “sense-organ” in general
existed. But if you put it to the test: study the eye, — it
is completely different from the ear. The one indeed lies above and
the other beneath the “niveau” which we
explained just now. In their whole form and structure, eye and ear
prove to be totally diverse organs. This surely is significant and
should be borne in mind. Today now we will go thus far; please
think it over in the meantime. Taking our start from this, we will
tomorrow speak of the science of sound and tone, whence you will
then be able to go on into the other realms of Physics.

There is
however one more thing I want to demonstrate today. It is among the
great achievements of modern Physics; it is in truth a very great
achievement. You know that if you merely rub a surface with your
finger — exerting pressure, using some force as you do so,
— the surface will get warm. By this exertion you have
generated warmth. So too by calling forth out-and-out mechanical
processes in the objective world external to yourself, you can
engender warmth. Now as a basis for tomorrow's lecture, we have
rigged up this apparatus. If you were now to look and read the
thermometer inside, you would find it a little over
16° C. The vessel contains water. Immersed in the body of
water is a kind of drum or flywheel which we now bring into quick
rotation, thus doing mechanical work, whirling the portions of the
water all about, stirring it thoroughly. After a time we shall look
at the thermometer again and you will see that it has risen. By
dint of purely mechanical work the water will have gained in
warmth. That is to say, warmth is produced by mechanical work. It
was especially Julius Robert Mayer who drew attention to this fact,
which was then worked out more arithmetically. Mayer himself
derived from it the so-called “mechanical equivalent of
warmth” (or of heat). Had they gone on in the same spirit in
which he began, they would have said no more than that a certain
number, a certain figure expresses the relation which can be
measured when warmth is produced by dint of mechanical work or
vice-versa. But they exploited the discovery in metaphysical
fashion. Namely they argued: If then there is this constant ratio
between the mechanical work expended and the warmth produced, the
warmth or heat is simply the work transformed. Transformed, if you
please! — where in reality all that they had before them was
the numerical expression of the relation between the two.